1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus which estimates the direction of arrival of a signal by using an array sensor and a direction-of-arrival estimation method. The present invention can be applied to a radar, sonar, lidar, etc.
2. Description of the Related Art
As an example of the radar, sonar, lidar, etc., the radar projects forward a transmit wave modulated by a baseband signal such as a triangular wave, and receives a wave reflected from a target; the received reflected wave is then mixed in a mixer with a portion of the transmitted signal to obtain a baseband signal containing information about the target such as the relative distance and the relative velocity with respect to the target are calculated from the baseband signal. Such radars are commercially implemented as automotive radars, etc.
One possible method for determining the direction in which the target is located is to use an array antenna having a plurality of antenna elements to receive the reflected wave from the target, and to determine the direction of the target by applying a direction-of-arrival estimation method such as the well known beam-former method.
In a direction-of-arrival estimation method using an array antenna, for example, in the beam former method that scans the main lobe of the array antenna in a certain direction and determines the direction in which the output power is the greatest as being the direction of arrival, the width of the main lobe determines the angular resolution; therefore, if it is desired to increase the resolution so that the directions of many targets can be determined, the aperture length of the array must be increased by increasing the number of antenna elements. The same is true of the min-norm method that determines the direction of arrival from the eigenvalue and eigenvector of the correlation matrix of the array's received signal, and its extended algorithms such as MUSIC (MUltiple SIgnal Classification) and ESPRIT (Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques); that is, in these methods also, since the degree of the correlation matrix, i.e., the number of antenna elements, determines the number of targets that can be detected, the number of antenna elements must be increased in order to make it possible to determine the directions of many targets.
However, in the case of a radar apparatus such as an automotive radar where severe constraints are imposed on the mounting dimensions of the antenna, it has been difficult to increase the number of antenna elements without reducing the receiving power.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2000-155171 proposes a method that expands the effective aperture by switching between three to four transmitting antennas for operation. However, this method increases circuit complexity, and gives rise to such concerns as the accumulation of the discontinuities in the received signal phase due to the switching operation and the effect on the calibration due to the asymmetry of electromagnetic coupling.
Further, in the beam former method, the field of view of the radar is limited to within the range that can avoid grating lobes; here, as the antenna element spacing becomes closer to λ/2, the field of view becomes wider (±90°). In reality, however, the field of view is not greater than about ±10°, since the spacing is usually about 2λ because of the constraints imposed on the physical dimensions and the gain of the antenna.